Watched a video about solo vs multicrew mining in the Mole and while being impressed with the ship it brought home to me the risks of not thinking through how ship interiors will affect gameplay (in this case mining).
I certainly do not relish having to position the ship, walk to the attached mining turret, walk back to the cockpit to make position adjustments then walk back to the turret etc...
Mining in ED is definitely more practical for the solo player though I wish there was someway multicrew would make large ships more efficiently run.
re: mining gameplay dev popularity - i think the dream is to mine raw materials, refine & process them & combine all these to build things. Unfortunately, few games ever get to the building part much less get it right.
Multicrew mining in the Mole is pretty good but the ship isn't designed for and not really suited to solo mining. It has 3 times the ore capacity of the Prospy and bigger size 2 mining heads...plus, mining with a mate is always a blast. With said mate as crew either driving, or taking turns in the mining cab with me driving the bus, we average roughly 100k each per run in the Mole with a 50-50 split of the profits. You've also got to communicate with eachother via VOIP or Discord crewing a Mole or it's a real pain, text chat is useless.
Any more than 2 in the Mole (driver and someone in the front mining cab) is a waste of time, it doesn't make mining any faster, just less profitable...The Prospy, I can regularly haul 75k-100k profit solo by being a bit picky.
Mining is time consuming and exactly why the pew-crew, who generally have the attention span of a wasp, hate it so much... but there's no real way to mine quickly and make the big bucks consistently...it's all about patience, cherry picking the right deposits, a bit of skill and know how but most of all, enjoying it for what it is...It's kinda what I do in SC...that and a bit of cargo shuffling.
ROC mining is where it's at though for the moment...I'll let you know how that is in this patch when I've seen how much they've nerfed it by making the Hadanite more rare...